As we have been saying
— in effect — in this book and the last
two books focusing on death and the after-life (You
CAN'T Take It With You and You
WILL Take it With You), there is no bigger psychic bully than
death, both as a looming inevitability, and as an actual experience. We
would like to avoid thinking about death, and avoid death itself, even
more than we would like to avoid being in states of boredom, doubt, or
discomfort.

Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross

And yet, when we actually
die (or have a near-death experience [Moody]),
despite whatever wriggling we did to try to get out of it before we just
gave in to it — for instance, in the form of Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross’s four predecessors to acceptance of death: denial, anger,
bargaining, or feeling depressed), we experience something quite different
from what was moving us to deny, be angry, bargain, etc.: we experience
the overwhelmingly loving and blissful Presence of God, even to such a
degree that we never want to leave It.

Now this sequence
is worth examining very carefully: first all the reactions that tend to
arise in relation to all the psychic bullies in our life; then, completely
giving in or surrendering; then Absolute Happiness.

The secret hidden
here is in the discovery that this sequence is not coincidental. In any
moment that we completely surrender our selves — surrendering our
struggle, our searching for a way out, our reactivity — the Revelation
of God is bound to appear in some form (e.g., in the feeling of great
happiness).

Let me tell you a
couple of personal stories, to give you a feeling for the breadth and
power of the point being made here.

flotation
tank
similar to the one I lay in

A friend of mine once
took me to visit a “New Age” relaxation center whose primary feature was
a set of flotation tanks. (This was back in the early 1980’s, when such
things were hitting the peak of their popularity.) My friend told me,
“You’ll love it! It’s a deeply relaxing experience!” Here’s the way it
worked. You go into a private room, undress, take a shower, and then enter
the white tank in the middle of the room. The tank is full of a liquid
solution that has a heavy Epsom salt concentration that causes anyone lying
back in the tank to float, effortlessly. And the tank also has a lid.

So I climbed into
the tank, and lay back. It was wonderful! Just floating in that
liquid. . . very relaxing, soothing. Then I pulled the lid down. The idea
was that you’d stay in this “womblike” environment for about half an hour,
undisturbed by any sounds, sights — any sensory stimuli at all — and you
would have something like a meditative experience. Then after a half an
hour, some gentle music would “bring you back”, and you’d climb out of
the tank.

But, in fact, as soon
as the lid went down, I felt sheer terror. I suppose it was a kind of
claustrophobia. Everything in me wanted to push that lid up again and
climb out. Right away! I fought down that immediate impulse, only to find
distressing thoughts creeping in. What if the attendant who was responsible
for turning on the music forgot? How long might I lay in that tank? And
on and on.

The "relaxing
experience" had turned into a nightmare. But two things held me in
place. The first was the thought that I might very well have a similar
feeling of terror when I died, but there would be no “lid to lift up”,
no way of “climbing out”. So better to start getting acquainted with such
intense feelings now, and somehow learn to practice with them. The second
thing was that I had recently begun reading the teaching of my Spiritual
Master, and I had some sense of the way things actually work in the realm
of the psyche, and I realized that this was one of my first opportunities
to see my Master’s words about “surrender” and “feeling” in action in
a very personal way.

So I hung in there.
I didn’t raise the lid. I simply allowed myself to feel the terror. It
got worse. It grew to the point where I felt certain I was going to die.
And I continued to just feel it.

And then a miracle
happened. In a single instant, all the fear vanished, and I suddenly felt
completely happy.

I was blown away by
this. I mean, after all, isn’t it completely counter-intuitive that one
instant you would be feeling complete terror, and then the next, complete
happiness? It didn’t make any immediate sense. But there it was.

I was so happy. I
just revelled in that happiness mindlessly without any self-consciousness.
At a certain point, the music came on, and I climbed out of the tank.
I looked at my watch — an hour had passed! The attendant had indeed forgotten
to turn the music on at the appointed time. And I didn’t care.

At another point in
my life, my then-girlfriend and I separated. The sadness and sense of
loss that I felt was greater than I had ever felt before in such a separation.
Over the course of a month, my life was dominated by this feeling of intense
sorrow. I was a professor at the time, and, as I’d be walking down the
corridors of the school building, tears would suddenly start pouring down
my face, and I’d have to do my best to turn in such a way that my students
and colleagues didn’t see them.

The intensity of this
sorrow kept growing for weeks. Then, one night, as I lay in bed, the sorrow
became overwhelming. And something very interesting began to happen. The
thought came to mind that I could call a friend, and try to distract myself
that way. But even as the thought arose, I simultaneously somehow knew
that the pain was too deep for this distraction to relieve it. Then I
thought of going to a movie. Same thing. Reading a book. Same thing. And
so on. Even as this was happening, another part of me was watching in
fascination as I witnessed something I had never really noticed so clearly
before: my mind was primarily organized, in every moment, to search for
ways to distract me from intense feeling! It was literally like watching
a computer program in action. It tried one option. That failed. Then it
tried another. That failed. But it systematically stepped through all
my usual distractions, one by one. And then it ran out.

There were no more
distractions. There was not the possibility for distraction in that moment.
I no longer had an option: I had no choice but to feel this sorrow. And
so, having no choice, I surrendered. I let the sadness overwhelm me. Just
like my feeling of terror in the flotation tank, I felt sure that I was
going to die.

And then the miracle
happened again — in a single moment, the sadness was replaced by sheer
Bliss.

The
Gift, then, provided by the moment of our death, or our near-death,
is that death forces us — with overwhelming strength — to completely
surrender, and then it reveals to us the Fruit of doing so. My Spiritual
Master, Adi Da Samraj, elaborates:

In some sense
the greatest power of all, the greatest Grace of all, therefore,
is unqualified pain. As long as you have an option, some way to
slip and slide out of your dilemma, your difficulty, your egoic
“self-possession”, you will tend to take the way out or otherwise
just be confused. All of you must have had some moments in your
life when the pain, the confusion, the forcefulness, of the intrusion
of the difficulty of life was so profound you could not figure
anything out about it, you could not make an emotional gesture
to escape, you could not do anything physically about it, you
could not do anything socially about it, or anything else. It
was so confusing, so overwhelming, so profound, it was not even
that you could surrender but surrender was inevitable. You nakedly
felt beyond yourself, relieved of your apparently independent
self, the egoic self eliminated by that most profound intrusion.
. . .

And then there
is a kind of beatitude, not necessarily Divine Enlightenment every
time such a thing occurs, but a kind of beatitude, continuous
with what Is. In such a moment, you must be given up to What Is,
whatever It Is, and there is no choice about it. . . .

You are all
the time fearing death and great pain and the most dreadful of
consequences. If any of those things did happen, a beatitude would
be inevitable. But there is a great lesson in pain. In pain, you
can allow that very same condition of beatitude to coincide with
your ordinary life. You can allow it. It can become the greatest
principle of Yoga, the greatest principle of [Spiritual practice].
You will allow, even embrace, great discipline, great devotion,
great service, great meditation, great heat, great tapas, knowing
that in such circumstances there is always beatitude, because
no choice is available to you.

The great
[Spiritual] Realizers know this secret. I know it. If you can
come to the point of allowing such complete and total surrender,
so that you never avoid it, so that in fact it becomes the condition
of existence, then life is beatitude, existence is beatitude.

There is a
secret in such surrender that is most fundamental to [Spiritual
practice]. Allow yourself to be cooked, to be burned alive, to
avoid nothing. To be, in this moment, in such a place where surrender
is not even your only choice, where it is only inevitable — this
is the secret of most effective [Spiritual practice]. It is the
secret of renunciation. It is why renunciation is the secret of
Realization, bereft of all means, all strategies, only There,
without resorts of the egoic kind, in Place with the One Who Is,
only devotion and not by choice. There is no choice. Giving yourself
no choice whatsoever is the greatest principle of [Spiritual practice].

Avatar
Adi Da Samraj

Be God-made,
God-born, with God allowed, God Existing, and with no alternatives
— this is the great Secret. The greatest Realizers, the greatest
renunciates, all know this Secret. This is why they do what they
do. But if you are only mediocre, always trying to avoid the great
Imposition of Reality Itself, then you always have an option,
some way to slip or slide to the right or left, always some way
to desensitize yourself to the great Condition, not to mention
all conditions. To become so humbled, so ground up, that there
cannot be anything but Divine Enlightenment, this is the Secret.
Mark my words!

You are all
maintaining options that is what I am telling you. You always
have an option. Even suggesting to yourself, “I would choose always
the option of surrender and devotion” still gives you room. You
should give yourself no room — devotion absolute, imposed to the
absolute degree so that no gesture even can or even need be made,
but only God Is. That is the Secret.

So
what is actually going on here? How can we make sense of this general
principle, as well as all the demonstrations of it — my own personal
ones, and the large number of accounts of near-death experiences — which
all seem to point to the same conclusion: “complete surrender restores
Happiness”?

The thing that we
are (unconsciously) doing in every moment (which, in the context of psychic
bullies, is made most obvious) is avoiding feeling fully. The surrender
that took place in the experiences I described is fundamentally a psychic
surrender, in which we simply cease to avoid feeling fully:

Remarkably enough,
the reason you are so disturbed about the facts of life that might
make you fearful, sorrowful, and angry is that whenever something
arises that you might appropriately be angry, fearful, or sorrowful
about, you do not feel it completely. You limit your feeling of
even these reactions. And you certainly limit your feeling of the
circumstance, or the condition that is arising. You are always exhibiting
the evidence of limited feeling, obstructed feeling. If feeling
becomes limitless, if you do not contract, then feeling becomes
Being Itself — no reaction, no contraction, Feeling without limit.
That Feeling goes beyond fear, sorrow, anger, and conventional happiness
and loving attitudes.

What
is It? It is Love-Bliss. It is the Self-Existing and Self-Radiant
Force of Being, without the slightest obstruction. It is Divine
Enlightenment. It Divinely Transfigures the body-mind and becomes
a Power, a Great Power, and — because now you are looking at manifestation
through this color, this “one flavor”, this Free Force or Free Energy
— It even allows you to interpret everything differently. Now you
will not be saying that manifest existence is evil or suffering
or sinful, or that others are unloving, that we are mortal, that
we are going to die, that it is a terrible life, and so forth. Instead,
you will regard all of manifest existence to be pervaded by Love-Bliss.
Not merely Bliss coming at you from every direction, but Love-Bliss,
Self-Existing and Self-Radiant, Radiating from every direction in
the Place where you Stand, as you, and everywhere, altogether. It
has no center, it has no bounds, it has no limits. It is Free Energy.
And, in the midst of Free Energy, you are Free as attention, not
limited, not obstructed in your attention.